Outdoor telephone booths and pedestals are popular for use in strip-type shopping centers, malls, and other public businesses and other facilities as mountings for public or coin telephones. Many current telephone mounting arrangements are purchased and installed by building contractors and property owners rather than by telephone companies. In addition, many public or coin telephones are owned by property owners rather than by telephone companies, and the proceeds from operation of such telephones are retained by the property owner.
There is a variety of different applications for public or coin telephones in such facilities. For example, telephones are often provided in close proximity to buildings or other structures. A typical single-height mounting arrangement is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,752,927 and U.S. Pat. Des. 232,541 to Bartley et al. In other applications, telephones are provided for drive-up use, either in a curbside mounting or directly installed on the pavement of a parking lot. Curbside mounting for drive-up use is typically a lower mounting than a pavement mounting because of the height added by the curb. Additionally, in high density applications it is sometimes desirable to provide for two telephones mounted back to back. Yet still further, in some applications it is required to provide for a mounting of a telephone at standard handicap access height.
Prior to the present invention, each of these different outdoor applications has required a separate type of mounting arrangement to accommodate the varying height requirements. For heavy users of public or coin telephone mountings, this has necessitated inventory storage of several different types of mounting arrangements.
Additionally, it is known that outdoor telephone mounting arrangements placed at public locations are often susceptible to destruction by vandals or theft. There is considerable loss of money by telephone companies and private owners of the telephones as a result of such vandals and thieves who break into coin boxes of the telephones or remove the entire telephone assembly from the telephone booth mounting assembly when burglarizing. Accordingly, it is further important to prevent or delay unlawful attempts to remove or break into the telephone assembly.
Typical of such arrangements is U.S. Pat. No. 3,511,941 to Quigley, which employs a support wall, a mounting plate, and a partially-surrounding enclosure, and means for affixing the telephone to the mounting plate independently of enclosure. The above-mentioned Bartley et al. U.S. Pat. No. 3,752,927 describes an arrangement whereby the juncture between the rear edge of the front housing of the telephone and front edge of the back housing of the telephone is protected inside the mounting post, to make it more difficult to pry into the telephone housing.
However, there is a need for an improved mounting system for public or pay telephones which is secure in the sense that vandalism and theft is discouraged, yet which is flexible and versatile in configuration such that a wide variety of mounting arrangements including variable height and back-to-back mountings are convenient.